I spun through about eighteen of my fellow citizens who were uniformly engaged in lying to the public and finally hit a girl with too much rosin on her voice, which was what I wanted. "When a Broadway baby goes to bed It's early in the morning--" I did a feather and a few more Peabody steps and a couple of advance left turns. The dame put a mute on the bridge of her nose. Broadway dreamed off to her lullaby. She began, "Say it with music--" I thought of Palmer Gymnasium on the Princeton Campus in about 1922--the June, the quiet trees, the cigarettes like cherry-colored fireflies, the flappers, a cicada competing with strings and woodwinds, and me outside because I didn't have the spondulix and the tux. My throat thickened with something sharper than carcinoma. If only I had known then what I know now. And suddenly I remembered that I _had_ known. In that musky dark, in the dark of a thousand other disappointed evenings, in the beam and blister of every day, I had been tightening the spring for the run. The anticipated journey--the slatting of my choo-choo train around its silver track. I knew then because I was doing it. And I knew now, but differently, because it was done. That poignancy was not this. Beneath the fragrant maples and beyond the envious desuetude had burned the gathering assurance. The response to challenge. Spondulix, tux, and young girls' tongues, and stingers, too. Incidents. Repressions, Mr. Wylie. Inferiority, Phil. What had kept me so steadfast despite my passions of despair? Despite all music--despite the Weltschmerz of underprivileged sophomores? I looked at my old friend, The Typewriter. "Somehow they'd rather be kissed To the strains of Chopin or Liszt--" The more we succeed the more we fail. When I am gone, who'll write on you and say the same things better? Plenty of them, Philip. You never put the bar up where even you could jump. Who ever did? It was damned near eight o'clock. I got dressed fast. PART TWO _Tarantella_ 1 The desk clerk told me that Mrs. Prentiss had Room 1603--the apartment, not only next to mine but accessible from mine by a set of doors--now partly locked: I'd turned the key in the door on my side and tried the other, when I'd arrived. "I thought," I said, "that she was a few floors down--" "She moved this afternoon, Mr. Wylie. To get out of the heat, where there was more air." Or more something. I hung up and looked at the doors. The promise not to make a pass at her naturally crossed my mind. It was, evidently, a one-sided commitment. At this season there weren't many guests in the hotel so she'd had no difficulty in moving near me. I wondered whether she would admit it or pretend it was a coincidence; and bet the latter way. _Honi soit qui mal n'y pense pas._ I checked myself in the mirror. Then I knocked on her door. The proper hall one.